13 posts about ruby
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Ruby’s $_ variable
Ruby has many cryptic variables, but one of them is particularly useful – especially if you’re processing text from the command line. -
Ruby regular expressions: the /o modifier
An explanation of the little-used – but handy-to-know – o modifier to Ruby’s regular expressions. -
Real progress in long-running command-line scripts
Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part two in a series, this time showing how to display real progress to users. -
Faking progress in long-running command-line scripts
Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part one in a series, this time dealing with how to show indeterminate, faked progress to reassure users that something is happening. -
Persisting data in Ruby with PStore
Ruby comes with a powerful persistent storage system that’s backed by flat files and handles concurrent access and transactions out of the box – stuff you’d expect to need a database for. It’s criminally underused, and it’s called PStore. Never roll your own file locking code again! -
Paths aren't strings
If you find yourself passing around lots of file paths in your Ruby scripts, you should save yourself a headache and use Pathnames, not strings. -
Nokogiri as a command-line tool
Most Rubyists are familiar with [Nokogiri][]. It’s a combination XML and HTML parsing tool most commonly used for “screen scraping”: that is, fetching a web page, and searching through it to extract information of interest. When a website you’re interested in doesn’t offer an API, it’s often the only way to extract information from it.
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ARGF in Ruby
Ruby has a construct, inherited from Perl, that makes it easy to write scripts that work with input from both files and standard input. It’s called ARGF, and here’s how to use it. -
Ruby's -e, -n and -p switches
Ruby inherits lots of goodness from Perl. One of those things is the ability to invoke it in one-liners from the command line, and when you do so there are three switches that come in handy. Here’s how to use them. -
Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part III
The final article in a series on accessing WordPress data from within Ruby scripts, using ruby-wpdb. -
Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part II
More examples of ways to use ruby-wpdb to access WordPress data from within Ruby scripts. -
Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part I
An introduction to ruby-wpdb, and how to use it to access WordPress data from Ruby. -
Clarifying lambdas
Blocks in Ruby are great. But sometimes, using named lambdas can be intention-revealing in a useful way. Here’s how.